When I talk about pictures in my mind I am talking, quite
specifically, about images that shimmer around the edges. There used to be an
illustration in every elementary psychology book showing a cat drawn by a patient
in varying stages of schizophrenia. This cat had a shimmer around it. You could
see the molecular structure breaking down at the very edges of the cat: the cat
became the background and the background the cat, everything interacting,
exchanging ions. People on hallucinogens describe the same perception of
objects. I’m not a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinogens, but certain
images do shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer.
It’s there. You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You
just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You don’t talk to many people
and you keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the
cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.
Just as I meant “shimmer” literally I mean “grammar”
literally. Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of
school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its
infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that
sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the
meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now,
but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and
the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind.
The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether
this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a
dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you
how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells
me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene.
It tells you.
You don’t tell it.
Joan Didion
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